Cultural Product

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Three years ago, when working on Plastici at Margot Lewer's home in Penrith, Lee-Anne Hall the director spoke with me about doing a project.
This year it became reality. It has been documented by the students at Caroline Chisolm High School on this blog
I was fortunate enough to have the great pleasure of assembling and arranging the donated works...
For real, usually I go out seeking/collecting/gathering, THIS TIME IT CAME TO ME! What is more, at the end of the project it was donated to Penrith Community Kitchen, and Oz Harvest...benevolent goodwill...over $20,000 in non-perishables were donated, and much as I would've liked even more, I felt like I was the beneficiary of way more.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Cementa_15 http://www.cementa.com.au/
Paint and permanent marker on glass
"Cuts n curls": every time the phone rings, in a cutesy-pie singsong voice...from the instant I arrived there were always at least three people in the busy salon, gossiping and discussing life. I sat in the window doing my thing, listening in on the talk, sometimes contributing, but mostly eavesdropping. I learnt a lot about Kandos in those two days.
I really shouldn't have rushed at the start, as that is when I was masking off. Rushing art is not good. Ever. But I only had a limited time to get it done...hopefully I learned a lesson.
But sitting listening to the gossip was enthral long and I felt closer to the locals through that experience, and how most liked a drink, some loved the monster trucks and they all loved their children.
The work was originally meant to be situated in the NRMA windows, but they were shy and wary. In the end I was glad I'd gotten to spend the time in the hairdressers and had them do my do for the opening night, fancy!
On Saturday is saw a couple of kids in the window pretending to drive the car. It dint work out in the way I'd envisioned it,but by the end I got used to it. It feels like it's stuck in the past, and is a bit hobbled by its lack of tyre...poor old thing, it's like another self portrait!
Thank you so much for the chance to get closer to you all.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Anne Kay and Jane Polkinghorne did a video project ten years ago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Situation curated by Russell Storer; interviewing 100 artists. They then showed the work at Sydney College of the Arts ten years later with some updates.
These were my answers in 2015
Q1. How do you see your role as a visual artist?
Q2. How you measure the success (or lack of success) of your practice?
Q3. How do you see you practice in relation to social or political issues of the day?
1. My role is to do my work. In my case it is to respond to the time we live in now, and to formulate work that collects, converts and inverts the staging of our current society. I still believe in alchemy and making something out of nothing is true magic.
2. I suppose it comes down to the facility in which I operate, and whether what I instigate actually comes to fruition.
3. I maintain that all art is political, subtle or not. My practice is informed by my personal politics and socialism. In confronting the reality of the time I live in, I engage in the polemics of consumerism, and my place within that structure.

Sunday, January 4, 2015

At The Bearded Tit, Redfern
Emma Price asked me to do the window of the bar, and in response to the surrounding area and Jane Bennett's wonderful book https://www.dukeupress.edu/Vibrant-Matter/, I installed a hodge-podge installation...haha you can see my fat feet in the bottom photo...